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FiveBooks Interviews
The sinologist says there is a kind of blood that flows through Chinese history and literature, and is expressed especially by the writers who can really go to the truth, to the inner, to the deep things. She chooses books by five such writers.
The award-winning writer, currently writing for Treme, the new HBO show from The Wire creator David Simon, says that there is a profundity in the expression of joy in New Orleans because of the constant awareness of mortality. Your end could come from natural causes, a shooting, or the breaking of a levee, so while you are here you need to live with defiant grace and beauty.
The author of From a Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb chooses five books on the Troubles, and describes his own relationship with Ireland and his journey through the grief at the death of his identical twin in 1979.
The psychotherapist and key negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement says peace depends on talking to the people who are actually perpetrating the violence. Obama seemed to understand that, but progress, he says, is now slipping backwards. He chooses five seminal works on the causes of terrorism.
The Israeli lawyer, politician and author says the Zionist revolution sought to turn Jewish civilisation into a nation state like all nation states and under the rule of international law. There is no inherent contradiction between Israel as a Jewish state and any other nation state. He chooses five books on Israel.
Too often, argues the Hoover Institution scholar, universities are places where small orthodoxies elbow aside big ideas; too many Americans are embarrassed to talk about morality in terms of virtue and character, not just rules and intentions. We need to remember that freedom isn't value-free.
Modern conservatism, explains the Cato Institute vice-president and author of The Age of Abundance, is a coalition of libertarians and traditionalists who, in another age, would be at each other’s throats. For bringing them together they can thank – roll over, Karl Marx – socialism. He chooses five books on conservatism and liberalism.
The former George W Bush administration speechwriter and impresario of FrumForum.com thinks the future of conservatism depends on coping with the world as it is, not throwing ideological tantrums or dreaming of revolutions. The American right needs to rediscover the unsentimental realism that it once so successfully pioneered.
The American writer says she has an obsession with recording Burma’s vanishing stories because, as a result of the regime’s actions, history is being rewritten, memories are being eroded and stories lost. She chooses five books that describe the real Burma from within.
The Dutch army captain whose unit secured Tuzla airbase for the incoming UN aid in 1994 talks about the books he kept with him in Bosnia and the inspiration for his Yugoslav novel, King of Tuzla. Hear Arnold recite the title poem from his poetry collection, Yugoslav Requiem.